Here is a nice little Tiger Cowry sitting on a dichroic glass stage.

Yesterday we finally got out into the cold cold water again. We went out on the Giant Stride carefully exercising appropriate behaviors.  We dove Biodome and there were hundreds of millons of billions (lots) of Hermissenda everywhere. A bit chilly (49-51ºF) but with good visibility at depth. Here is a nice little Triopha catalinae (Clown) from Biodome sitting on the dichroic glass stage. It turns out that there is a conserved set of neurons in a bunch of different nudibranchs and that at least one set is used for swimming by melibes and crawling by the Triopha. This means that nature only had to invent the circuitry once but each species has had to learn how to use it. See Homologues of serotonergic central pattern generator neurons in related nudibranch molluscs with divergent behaviors James M. Newcomb and Paul S. Katz  if you really want to know more (you don't).

Here is a nice little Montereina (once Peltodoris) nobilils from our dive on Monday. This one is sitting on a dichroic glass stage on the bottom at 55 feet or so (17 meters) at Garden Spot.

In a fit of insanity or at least stay at home blues, I bought a lens (advertised on Backscatter as one of their weird lens collection) that is basically a combination of a 180 degree circular fisheye and the swirly tube. It is basically a big glass marble mounted inside a housing. You can get super close to whatever you are shooting. I tried it out on our latest trip on Monday and here is a shot of some corynactus that was covering the reef at Garden spot. The lens is hard to shoot with in the sense that everything is both upside down and left/right inverted in the viewfinder.

Here is a nice little Triopha catalinae from our dive a week ago at Palos Verdes. He is sitting on a piece of dichroic glass.

Here is a nice little H. opalescens from our dive last Monday. This one (there were gazillions) was at Garden Spot, just crawling along the sand.

Here is a nice little worm from a Blackwater Dive near Komodo.

The other side of the worm.

Here is a nice little Costasiella sitting on the dichroic glass stage in pretty shallow water so the sun created the colors on the stage. The strobe was (at least I tried) intended to bounce off of the stage first to get some color on Shaun, but I think the sun colors were too bright to see the colors from the bounce light.

Here is a nice little Blenny from somewhere near Komodo.

Here is a nice little juvenile cow/box fish we found on a black water dive.

Here is a nice little Doriprismatica atromarginta sitting on the dichroic stage in Indonesia. These guys can be the source of a variety of starting compounds for new anti-cancer therapies. According to a paper in the Journal on Natural products

"The high diversity of chemical compounds and variation between individuals and locations could reflect a varied sponge diet or an enzymatic detoxification mechanism."

Green Anemone. Because sometimes there are no nudibranchs.

Blackwater worm from a trip on the Samambaia.

Here is a nice little juvenile boxfish whose body is quite rigid yet it swims well. Mercedes introduced a concept car based on this little guy.

We went diving yesterday with friends on our favorite boat, the Giant Stride. We dove PV and it was a bit chilly but the diving was awesome. I have a new dichroic glass sample that is a very thin dichroic filter on top of a red transparent glass. Here is a nice little Hermissenda sitting on the glass and you can see the red color in the wavy part of the reflection. 

On our dive yesterday there were some cool looking snails crawling around. This guy has a pretty grimy shell but you can see his eye and I like his foot colors.

A nice little yellow fringehead from Friday's dive with friends on the Giant Stride. You can see the catchlight from the ringstrobe in his eyes.